Dyslexia research has made dramatic progress since the mid-1980s. Once discounted as a “middle-class myth,” dyslexia is now the subject of a complex—and confusing—body of theoretical and empirical research. This book provides a uniquely broad and coherent analysis of dyslexia theory. Unlike most dyslexia research, which addresses the question “what is the cause of the reading disability called dyslexia?” the work presented here addressed the deeper question of “what is the cause of the learning disability that manifests as reading problems?” This perspective allows the text to place dyslexia r ... More

Dyslexia research has made dramatic progress since the mid-1980s. Once discounted as a “middle-class myth,” dyslexia is now the subject of a complex—and confusing—body of theoretical and empirical research. This book provides a uniquely broad and coherent analysis of dyslexia theory. Unlike most dyslexia research, which addresses the question “what is the cause of the reading disability called dyslexia?” the work presented here addressed the deeper question of “what is the cause of the learning disability that manifests as reading problems?” This perspective allows the text to place dyslexia research within the much broader disciplines of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience and has led to a rich framework, including two established leading theories, the automatization deficit account (1990) and the cerebellar deficit hypothesis (2001). The chapters in this book show that extensive evidence has accumulated to support these two theories and that they may be seen as subsuming the established phonological deficit account and sensory processing accounts. Moving to the explanatory level of neural systems, they argue that all these disorders reflect problems in some component of the procedural learning system, a multi-region system including major components of cortical and subcortical regions. The authors’ answer to the fundamental question “what is dyslexia?” offers a challenge and motivation for research throughout the learning disabilities, laying the foundations for future progress.